Andrew Liszewski

He created one of the first Rubik's Cube solving LEGO bots, and even used Mindstorms to tackle Sudoku puzzles. And while Hans Andersson's latest LEGO marvel — a digital clock called the Time Twister — may be a little mundane, it's certainly no less impressive.

This video of the blazingly fast CubeStormer II setting a new world record for solving a…
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It's powered by a couple of NXT controller bricks that wirelessly communicate over Bluetooth, with a master brick keeping track of time and controlling the minute digits, while the other slaved brick handles the second ticker and hours. The number indicators are composed of five tiled layers that work kind of like a Rubik's Cube, individually rotating until the tiled patterns form a recognizable number. But to minimize the number of motors used in the clock, each layer spins a full 360 degrees before locking and spinning the layer below it, requiring a specific sequence of time-consuming turns before the next number is displayed. And before you question the wisdom of building something out of LEGO that's already integrated into nearly every electronic device on the planet, remember it's the build process that's the most interesting part of the project, not the final product. [Time Twister via Make]